How John Durham Buried Evidence He Had Been Doing the Work of Russian Spies … and then Tulsi Gabbard Buried More

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As I’ve been showing, the Durham classified annex goes to significant lengths to hide that a Russian email discussing creating a conspiracy theory about the American Deep State, which he dates to July 26, precedes the draft SVR memo he claims has animated his years-long hunt, which dates to July 27 or later.

You can date the draft SVR memo (Durham doesn’t provide its date at all in the unclassified report, and if he does here, the date has been redacted) by tracking the inputs (red arrows) into the fake emails on which the draft memo is purportedly based (blue arrows), as I lay out here.

You can review a live copy of this (without the arrows) at this link.

The fake email integrated into the memo itself — bearing the date of July 25 but mentioning the Olympics — derives from the Thomas Rid story and the real Tim Maurer email — but it appears to have been altered to add the reference to the Olympics on July 27 (because a copy without the Olympics mention is attached to an email dated July 27).

And the fake email, bearing the date of July 27, claiming that Hillary approved a plan on July 26 appears to derive from the real July 27 Julianne Smith email soliciting a totally innocuous letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO. We might learn more about its creation, except the email to which it is attached is entirely redacted in the annex.

That is, so long as his claim that the Deep State memo is dated “the day after” two emails purporting to be dated June 25 is accurate, then the emails and draft report that guided his entire investigation were the conspiracy theory proposed on July 26. Durham did the work of Russian spies for four years.

If this is, indeed, the timeline, then Durham — as well as John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel — should have recognized they were pursuing an investigation of Hillary Clinton based off a deliberate Russian spy hoax.

There’s one more thing that supports this argument — and reveals how problematic it is for Durham (who continued his investigation for two more years after he would have concluded the emails were “composites”) and the others: the extent to which he, as well as the person who redacted this for release, tried to obscure all this in the classified annex.

This kind of deceit was not remotely unusual for Durham (as I’ll return to when I review what Durham did do after concluding he was using a clear Russian hoax as his excuse to investigate Hillary Clinton). Andrew DeFilippis, especially, did this kind of stuff all the time. Here, where he used email timestamps in two different time zones to falsely suggest that Fusion was the source for a public link about the Alfa Bank anomalies, is just one such example.

The list below is overwhelming. The most important detail, however, is how Durham treats the real email from Julianne Smith asking people to sign onto some totally innocuous letter criticizing Trump’s attacks on NATO. Durham obtained one copy of the email from the SVR trove and another from a subpoena, presumably to Smith or CNAS, where she worked.

The annex separates the disclosure that Julianne Smith had also been hacked (noted in footnote 27) from the discussion of the email she sent on July 27, obscuring that Durham obtained two copies of that email, one from the SVR collection (cited in the annex as Document Classified Appendix Document 9, which also includes the Maurer email), and one via subpoena (cited in the unclassified report as XXXX-0014561). He does that even though discussion of the “certain emails, attachments, and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage to the materials referenced above” precedes that discussion. In the unclassified report, he treats this email differently, effectively treating it as corroboration for the claims in the fake report, rather than a source used to fabricate it (though he later uses it as corroboration after concluding that the underlying emails are composites based on … that email).

In either case, however, if he is treating Smith’s July 27 email as a source (and that’s one place it appears in his report), then the draft memo must post-date the July 26 Deep State email.

On July 26, Russian spies decided it’d be cool to start a conspiracy theory about the Deep State. And on July 27, having stolen that Smith email, they decided to claim that Hillary — as opposed to some other Deep State entity — decided to smear Donald Trump.

And everyone involved in this is working really hard to hide that they knew that.

Update: On the topic of Smith’s email, I’ve been puzzling over the redaction in this passage; I wondered if Durham expressed some obnoxious opinion about her.

It was suggested to me, however, that that redaction might hide Durham speculating about what Russian spooks thought — maybe something like, “it is a logical deduction that [Russian spies believed that]”… The mention of the spies would therefore justify classification on classification bases. But holy hell if it were something like that, it would mean Durham was trying to rationalize why Russian spooks fabricated emails to make up this claim.

Durham’s deceits

By July 2021, John Durham had evidence to conclude the emails behind a draft SVR memo on which his entire investigation rested were “composites,” that is, fabrications. But he continued on for two more years, attempting and failing to create evidence to substantiate that Russian disinformation by prosecuting Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko. To hide that he had done that, he engaged in a great deal of deceit in both his unclassified and classified reports.

  • Durham frames his focus around three bullets John Ratcliffe included in his 2020 memo sending these materials to Lindsey Graham. The first bullet claims to focus on “Russian intelligence analysis,” suggesting that his focus was on a draft SVR report that leads the narrative in the classified appendix, but is actually the last document temporally. But the second bullet refers to John Brennan notes that quote not the purported end analysis, but an email advancing the plot to frame Hillary.
  • The two exhibits — Brennan’s notes and a referral from the CIA that he couldn’t prove ever got sent to FBI — include redactions that obscure the actual content of both. Importantly, witnesses were not shown the full exhibits, though Brennan correctly stated that Durham misrepresented what his notes were about.
  • Durham misrepresented how many witnesses (and who) testified that they had not seen the referral memo.
  • Thereafter in the unclassified report, Durham referred to “Clinton Plan intelligence” as if it focused on that discreet claim or even the draft memo, when it referred to the larger body of intelligence obtained via the Dutch, and so in context the plan to frame Hillary. In the classified report, Durham referred to Clinton campaign plan, rather than the intelligence asserting it.
  • Durham mentioned two Leonard Benardo emails early in the annex (there were actually four documents claiming to be emails in the report), then discussed the earlier, apparently finished, intelligence from earlier 2016 implicating Loretta Lynch, suggesting they were the emails. He returns to this strategy later in the appendix.
  • Then, the beginning of the section focused on the SVR documents starts with the draft memo, not the specific emails. He keeps moving the ball.
  • The date of the draft memo appears nowhere in the unclassified report and may not appear in the classified report either (if it is there, it is redacted).
  • The annex separates the disclosure that Julianne Smith had also been hacked (noted in footnote 27) from the discussion of the email she sent on July 27, obscuring that Durham obtained two copies of that email, one from the SVR collection (cited in the annex as Document Classified Appendix Document 9, which also includes the Maurer email), and one via subpoena (cited in the unclassified report as XXXX-0014561). He does that even though discussion of the email appears after the introduction, “certain emails, attachments, and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage to the materials referenced above.” In the unclassified report, he treats this email differently, effectively treating it as corroboration for the claims in the fake email, rather than a source used to fabricate it (though he also uses it as corroboration after concluding that the underlying emails are composites based on … that email). In either case, however, if he is treating Smith’s July 27 email as a source, then the draft memo must post-date the July 26 Deep State email talking about ginning up a conspiracy theory.
  • After introducing the Benardo emails, the annex discloses there were several versions of the July 25 one, which helps to obscure that one copy of the earliest version was attached to a July 27 email, which in turn suggests the reference to the Olympics was added on July 27. As noted, the redactions exacerbate this sleight of hand.
  • The annex hides that the Deep State email predates the draft memo by discussing the two versions of the July 25 Benardo email in-between.
  • The annex doesn’t appear to explain that one of two copies of the first fake July 25 email (without the Olympics) is considered part of the same document as the July 27 “vilify” email.
  • The description that the real Tim Maurer email is the same date as the fake July 25 emails gives the impression that they were made the same day, when at least the revisions of the fake email probably happened on July 27.
  • Durham provides a description of this (then-dated) article about a voting hacker for hire, but does not provide a description of the Thomas Rid article discussed in the email, which is not only a clear source for the draft memo, but should make analysts look twice at the Russian idiom in English in the fake Benardo email, because Rid discusses the language games behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona at some length.
  • When Durham concedes the emails to which the draft memo is sourced are composites, he does not name CNAS, where Smith worked, even though earlier in the section he says she was hacked too.

Lying with redactions

  • The introduction to the draft memo redacts details about what is in it, most notably the emails the entire annex purports to focus on.
  • That continues in the redactions after the draft memo. This obscures which email was incorporated into the draft memo: the one referring to the Olympics. The redaction introducing the first fake July 25 email further obscures this, making it harder to figure out that Classified Appendix Document 6 is a July 27 email with one of the first versions of the July 25 email (that is, before the Olympics were added) attached.
  • The redaction of the email after the July 27 “vilify” one obscures that the July 27 Benardo email discussing Hillary’s approval is attached to that redacted email and not the “vilify” one, further obscuring that the emails dated July 25 were likely revised on July 27, to add the Olympics reference.
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Hold My Beer No More

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The America We’re Losing

I have a fond memory of dropping my barely school-aged child off with a friend for babysitting. My friend, Simone, took my daughter’s hand and said “You’re going to learn the right way to misuse a roman candle!” I held up my hands, and shouted “ten!” to indicate how many fingers I wanted my child to have when I picked her up. Simone waved me away while she whisked my child off to learn about using small explosives in creative ways.

I am often seized by the fatal American need to have a pretty good time https://www.mincingmockingbird.com/collections/postcards

The classic, very us, meme

My child grew up in a community of lovable dorks, weirdos, hackers, and burners. I grew up in the kind of family were we shot beer cans off fences. We did unwise things with cars that got rebuilt in a driveway, which no shock absorber in the universe could hope to cushion. We were very much a ‘hold my beer’ family, and we had the scars to prove it. But more important, we had the stories.

These stories are part of being American; they can even sometimes rise above the violent cut lines of our fractured society. Black, white, native, Afghan, Chinese, whatever, we all bring our stories, we tell them loudly and lovingly to each other, across generations, neighborhoods, and communities. Sometimes we tell them laughing, crying, or both.

Americans love a good story so much we will go out and make them, even if it costs a fingertip, or a bit of foot. It absolutely gets out of hand. We regret it sometimes. You can’t always stop before you’ve gone a bit too far. This is also why so many great American stories are about apologizing.

“Hold my beer” is what you say to your cousin on the raft right before you try shooting the fish that haven’t been taking the bait. It’s what you say right before you try to grab an alligator by the snout, because you saw someone do it on YouTube. It’s what comes right before you cliff jump into a pond, get on an improvised zip line, or try cocaine for the first time.

You can call us stupid, because we definitely are. But nobody denied that Americans were fun. When an American says hold my beer, someone inevitably reaches over to take it, and steps back to observe the mayhem from a safe(r) distance. We may end up with scars, but we’ll get a story to go with them.

But that fun, that’s getting complicated in these, the waning days of the American spirit.

Safety Third: unicycling will juggling chainsaws.

In the last few decades the very American desire to have some fun ran smack-dab into the carceral state, the cost of healthcare, and now, the rise of fascism. It has been all part of a long slow slide into not at all fun things. It’s continuously squeezing the whimsy out of being American. It is starting to hurt, really hurt, and not in a way that’s fun to tell people about later.

Americans were always known to be a little stupid about the rest of the world, but mostly that’s because the world is so far away. It’s a very big country with two very distant borders for most of the people. I now live on a continent where I have gone on a hike and accidentally crossed an international border. The frame of reference is different enough that it’s hard for Americans to understand the lives of others, but equally it’s hard for others to understand the lives of Americans.

There’s not much to tell us when we’re moving the wrong way, we struggle with out a larger frame of reference. Americans can’t imagine a healthcare system that just works, and almost no one else can imagine one that works as terribly as ours does.

I’ve traveled all over this lovely little blue marble, and when I tell people I’m American, they so often say the same thing: We hate the American government. But the Americans themselves? Americans are OK. Some Americans are great, one is even Snoop Dogg! (Everyone loves Snoop.)

When I assure them that I also hate the American government, and I’ve had to deal with it a lot more than they have, we all high five and go get drinks together.

Everything will kill you so choose something fun

50s style Florida man shows us how it’s done, whatever it is.

Whatever people have thought about the USA, Americans were always considered fun, even when we were still kind of English. We’ve been the good time people since before we were a country. Our reputation for partying was global before globalization.

In the 17th to 19th centuries, whaling ships that sailed out of Boston and other east coast ports would head out for years at a time, running around the world doing what we didn’t know at the time was a very bad deed – killing and harvesting whales. When American ships would pull up to cities anywhere around the world for some shore leave, it was Party Time. We bought the drinks, danced, sang, got in fights, and demanded mainly that everyone have a a good time, often on our shilling, or dollar, or whatever.

In writer and museum educator SJ Costello’s description, “The business of whaleships was welcome in such ports because the economies became so linked to their presence, but the whalers themselves could cause havoc in the few days they occupied the land. This was largely due to the dynamics of the crew and the lifestyle aboard: a bunch of young 18, 19, 20-something year-old men are let loose for a few days liberty after months on an often heavily-disciplined ship. Many of them have the twin goals of get drunk, have sex.”

We were memorable visitors.

The Americans would buy a few rounds, and come up with terrible ideas. The sailors of the whaling ships were the good time guys of the 17th to 19th century, and that set a lot of the tone for how people saw America and Americans in the early days of the nation. Partying sailors never impressed the good and great of any nation, but rarely did anyone turn down an American good time. And we never stopped being hold-my-beer crazy.

We eventually stopped whaling, but we didn’t stop the fun. We moved our fun into many things, but maybe most importantly, media and technology.

From the 20th to the 21st century, we made radio big, then TV, and finally Marvel movies. We even accidentally the memes when we made a whole internet. We’re not always the world’s favorite people, but that’s true for us, too. We’ve even made plenty of self-critical media. Take the Fallout franchise — it’s a classic example of the fact that even when we go hard on ourselves, were truly self-critical, we were still fun.

We’ve never really lost our reputation of bringing a good time. We’re adventurous and unguarded. We’re stupid and oblivious. Even when we’re trying to be guarded and sneaky, we just don’t manage it the way a Russian or a Chilean can. Eventually we just say something loud, weird, or funny, and blow our cover. We are the world’s goofy motherfuckers.

But this is changing now. And if we’re honest, it’s been changing for a while.

It’s harder to have some fun. The police seem to be everywhere, news reports about ICE are daily. Be careful, we tell each other. We say this because we care for each other. We say this, even though we know it is giving ground to the enemies of fun; and maybe our freedom, maybe even our human dignity.

The police are increasingly secret. They have gone from faces and badge numbers you could write down to body armor, camo, and masking. Sometimes they bare no markings beyond their air of malice, gaiter covered faces, sunglasses, and of course, their guns. This isn’t to protect them, they’re not really in much danger. It’s to install police in our minds as well as on our streets.

You never know who might be looking these days. You never know who might take your picture and put it online.

Two battle ready police, or possible soldiers, monitoring the scene outside the (now closed) Dale's Donuts.

The Donut has been secured.

I wanted to believe that authoritarianism is antithetical to the American character, but not because we’re freedom loving. All people love being free, just as all people love their communities and children. All people want to live in a system of justice, peace, and hope.

No, the way in which I hoped we were incompatible with fascism is that I believed that Americans were just too goofy to be ruled that way. We do crazy shit to see what happens. We just aren’t self preserving enough to obey in advance.

We point roman candles at each other, giggling, even though our health insurance sucks. We do things just to see if they hurt. We do things to see how much they hurt. We do things that hurt just so we can tell the story of when we did that thing, and how much it hurt.

But maybe it turned out some things just hurt too much. Or they hurt too deep.

It’s changing now. Sometimes people just disappear. So many of us are obeying in advance, pointing out the vulnerable, telling the police about our neighbors.

And the others, those neighbors, the ones who may be unwanted, they’re hiding. They don’t go out much. Some of them don’t go to work anymore. Some assure their friends they can work at home, so they’ll be OK. Don’t worry, they won’t answer the door.  Some of our friends don’t leave the house anymore at all. They’re scared, maybe because they’re vulnerable to ICE raids or because they don’t “look American” enough.

Or sometimes they’re not scared, just realistic. Just adapting to the slow and steady unpersoning of everyone Trump doesn’t like, who isn’t white enough, servile enough.

We might still be up for fighting the po-po in Downtown LA, but can we really keep it up? Will they take us away, one by one, put us in some camp, and no one will ever hear from us again?

Will anyone go looking?

Even the Trump supporters are trapped in their support. They can’t question or criticize anything without risking losing their standing, maybe their livelihood. For the rest of us, it’s worse. What happens if we try to cross the border, in or out? Will we be harassed? Will our devices be taken, our online lives rifled through like an underwear drawer?

Will some social media rant against the Trump administration be put down on a table in front of us by men with guns?

We look at each other differently. Any of these white roughneck men could be police, or their sympathizers.. The police could come from anywhere, and steal my friends, my neighbors, my family, away. We hear about Kilmar Abrego Garcia sometimes, but almost nothing of the hundreds who flew with him to El Salvador, in defiance of a legal court order.

We only hear of the vanished when a court case says they shouldn’t have been sent to South Sudan. How many Americans can find South Sudan on a map? We only carry the weight of these souls in their absence, but they are getting heavier every day. The law is for you, not for the rulers. Not for Trump.

Fascism always burdens the guilt of living for the not yet dead. It carries the fear of joy for anyone outside of the circle of the followers. And what they have is not joy – it’s gleeful cruelty, and it must be maintained at all costs. Don’t doubt. Keep your head down. Your favorite color will always be gray, whatever name they’re giving gray this week.

In a way, the most universal right we’re losing under the Trump regime is the right to be different, to be weird, to be ourselves, to be from somewhere, to not fit in, to be stupid, to make stories about the times we did those crazy things. To hand someone our beer and be a glorious American idiot. Maybe we need to be scared because we’re foreign, or gay, or need help in some way. Nobody can be sure they’re safely inside the circle of the authoritarian’s allowance all the time.

Hold my beer no more, America. We have murdered fun, and we will no longer be foolish and brave. Wondering why your neighbors disappeared isn’t fun. I keep wondering if I write the wrong thing, will someone (possibly even me), get hurt? The fun that binds up all our cares, our stories, our bold hope, we have traded it for a small and guilty existence, full of worry and what will our neighbors think of us? Will they report us?

It becomes a torrent, hard to hold in one’s head. Will we allow it all to happen, and worse, again? And again? The kids in cages, families destroyed by the Trumpian violence. The Salvadorian mega prison, but also all the overloaded prison camps full of who knows who, or even where. Some in southern Florida, Texas, filled and more than filled, waiting on a hurricane season NOAA can’t track like it used to.

Will they ever come home? Will their mothers look for their bones one day? Will the ones that didn’t speak up deny it happened? Just refuse to talk about it?

Will we become timid people?

I wonder who is allowed to have fun in America now. But also, who is required to look like they’re having fun.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/migrants-deportation-sos-message-texas-ice-b2743199.html

Detainees in Texas spelling out “SOS” with their bodies.

 

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The SVR Fabrication Necessitates Reconceiving the 2016 Russian Influence Operation

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A friend — an expert — recommended this David Graham column purporting to respond to Trump’s latest claim of a Russian hoax. It is solid enough.

It goes through all the assessments about the Russian attack on 2016 (notice how we never focus on Russia’s even more overt assistance for Trump in 2020 and 2024?), and describes that, “perhaps because” there’s so much evidence, Trump dismisses it as a hoax.

In spite of all of this evidence, or perhaps because of it, Trump has loudly insisted that it’s all a hoax.

Where it goes hopelessly off the rails is in this paragraph, in which Graham uses the passive voice to describe how three things — the focus on Carter Page, the Alfa Bank anomalies, and the Steele dossier — “assisted” Trump in instilling doubt.

His attempts to instill doubt have been assisted by the fact that some of the wilder rumors and reports concerning his campaign didn’t turn out to be true. Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, was a bit of an eccentric character but not a traitor, as some suggested, much less the key to unraveling any grand conspiracy. Trump was probably not communicating with a Russian bank via a mysterious server. He was almost certainly not a longtime Russian-intelligence asset. The so-called Steele dossier was full of falsehoods. I argued at the time that BuzzFeed’s decision to publish it was a grievous error, and it warped conversation about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

With that passive voice, Graham dodges the agency involved in these things, at least one of which goes back to a deliberate and apparently successful attempt to fill the dossier with disinformation, and another of which has been stoked by years of lawfare (and, as I suggested here, also had help from someone I believe was involved in the Russian operation).

Graham then describes an SVR plan* — concocted in advance of, but within a week of, the founding moment in the Steele narrative — to frame Hillary Clinton, a plan that right wingers have adopted as their own for years, this way:

A special counsel appointed by Barr during Trump’s first term, with the goal of ferreting out political skulduggery in the Russia investigation, found that messages about Clinton being treated as a smoking gun were, in fact, likely concocted by the Russians.

Again, the passive voice. Not, “the Russians concocted a hoax that a Bill Barr-appointed Special Counsel chased as if it were true for four years, two of those after he had concluded it was a fabrication,” but that that “Special Counsel ‘found’ that the document was concocted by Russians.”

And as a result, this column participates in the polarization about this debate that was baked in from the start. Graham presents claims, all true, and in the process pits actual facts against Trump’s necessary faith in the Hillary hoax. It’s a good column. But I’m not sure where it gets us.

I’d like to attempt to reconceive the 2016 election operation, not in terms of the judgments that spooks and prosecutors have come to (on which Graham focuses), but instead on what it achieved. I laid out some of this last year with LOLGOP, but this scheme adds the SVR hoax built into the process.

Network within the attention economy: First, in the election during which the attention economy became the medium in which elections (and politics generally) are contested, Russia tapped into that economy in a way that networked with right wingers. I’m in no way saying that Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s troll operation had an effect on the outcome (I’m less sure about the hack-and-leak operation). I believe now, as then, that the effect of the trolling operation was like throwing a few matches onto a flaming bonfire. But the trolls proved they could get Trump’s closest buddies to treat fakes like TEN_GOP as one of their own; Trump’s closest propagandists still prove to be easy, if pricier, marks. They also got Trump’s now Chief of Staff to treat them as real. It’s also likely that the chat rooms in which Trump’s allies orchestrated their own attention campaigns, starting with the one that a Nazi living in Eastern Europe helped to professionalize, were influenced by Russian-linked figures; chat rooms are a wonderful way to cultivate people with plausible deniability. Perhaps most importantly, the hack-and-leak campaign proved not just that Trump was happy to rely on Russian props for his own exploitation of the attention economy, but would even do really stupid things in pursuit of such props. Russia discovered they could get Trump and all his allies to chase what they were offering.

Impede Hillary: Ginger Rogers had to do everything backwards and in heels. So did Hillary. But she also had fend off a persistent wave of hacks (the effect of this on a campaign was overlooked). And her own attempts to function within that attention economy were not just drowned out by the algorithmically boosted efforts of Trump, but were corrupted by Russian disinformation.

Dangle various quid pro quos: Russia also offered a number of inducements they might collect on in case of a Trump win: An impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal, relying on GRU ties and sanctioned banks, to Trump’s personal attorney. Advance notice of the campaign and maybe energy deals to the Coffee Boy. Dirt for sanctions relief to the failson. Advance notice of the hack-and-leak campaign in exchange for a pardon for Julian Assange to the rat-fucker. Campaign assistance and millions in payment or debt relief in exchange for a plan to carve up Ukraine from the campaign manager. *** Importantly, Trump said yes — or at least, maybe — to every single one of these dangles. What disrupted them was the investigation — first the discovery of Mike Flynn’s intervention to undermine sanctions, then the exposure of the June 9 meeting, and ultimately the August 2 meeting exchanging campaign assistance in the context of a plan to eviscerate Ukraine. The Mueller investigation showed that every one of these men (save Don Jr, who wisely dodged the grand jury) lied to cover up these dangles. And Trump pardoned most of them, thereby affirming the import of those lies.

Entail complicity in destroying the Deep State: I’m largely alone in this, but I believe that at least one of those quid pro quos raised the stakes of the inducements. If it is true — as I laid out here — that the Shadow Brokers operation dumping NSA exploits used the same infrastructure as the Guccifer 2.0 operation, it would mean the acceptance of the latter involved tacit participation in the former. More concretely, by the time Roger Stone started pursuing a Julian Assange pardon in October 2016, WikiLeaks was already sitting on the CIA hacking tools stolen by Joshua Schulte, tools that Schulte himself recognized would make it easy for Russia to identify CIA’s operations and assets; by the time Stone started intervening at the “highest levels of Government” for Assange, Trump’s own CIA Director had dubbed WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service. In other words, well before he was elected, Trump unwittingly entered a deal that would make him a participant in the willful destruction of the US security establishment to deliver on his side of the bargain.

Stoke conspiracies about the Deep State: As I said here, that SVR plan, apparently birthed on July 26, 2016, to do …

something about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in the IC, Pentagon, Deep State (or somewhere else?) about American websites deploying a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU

… was probably no more than spaghetti at the wall. Not everything Russia tried that year worked. But that one did, because it weaponized Trump’s venality — his enthusiasm for all those inducements and therefore his anger that something (the investigation) prevented him from collecting them — and his narcissism. Consider: We know that Trump was all too happy to use the stolen files published at WikiLeaks to drive his information economy. We know that Trump was all too happy to use Hunter Biden — some parts of which came from Russia no matter where the actual laptop did — to drive his information economy. But the claims of a Hillary hoax, all built in from the start, remain his go-to distraction. To get out of his own Russian trouble, Trump used the dossier disinformation to take out one after another Russian expert at the FBI. At the moment Trump needed to reclaim his ability to distract and redirect attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, he turned back to his Russia Russia Russia grievance, a grievance that built on the disinformation injected in the dossier and — we now know — an SVR fabrication that gave him an excuse to corrupt the Justice Department and spin his adversaries as the enemy, which increasingly entailed relying, secretly, on Russia as his enabler.

At every step, Trump’s reliance on the Hillary hoax entailed more and more destruction of the US security establishment.

This is why I’m making such a big deal out of this redaction, one that attempts to hide that this was an SVR plot from the start and how obvious that should have been and likely was to Durham before he chose to continue his witch hunt pursuing Trump’s adversaries for two more years.

The redaction hides Durham’s efforts to obscure all that in an annex he likely assumed would be buried forever; the temporal games the annex play resemble ones Andrew DeFilippis repeatedly used during the Michael Sussmann trial. But it also attempts to hide that Trump’s top spies — the ones resuscitating a claim two of them first championed in an earlier attempt to distract and redirect — know that Durham attempted to obscure it. As I said, the people to whom this is obvious are Putin’s spies.

Over the years, Trump’s serial adherence to that Hillary hoax — out of necessity to avoid narcissistic injury, as his favorite tool to leverage the attention economy, and increasingly as a measure of loyalty of right wingers to him — has always depended on the continued cooperation of Putin’s spies. That’s how Trump came out of a meeting in Helsinki with Putin and declared the Russian spies were right. And that’s how we got to this place, where all three of Trump’s top spies are reading right from a script written by Russian spies nine years ago. They can’t reveal the plot. Trump can’t reveal the plot.***

The answer to the question, “What exactly is the “Russia hoax’?” is not all the proof that Russia interfered in our election to 2016, hoping to help Trump win. The answer is that the “Russia hoax” is a ploy Russian spies seeded all those years ago to leverage Trump’s narcissism to polarize the US on competing sides of a grievance that would have the effect of destroying the US Deep State.

* SVR is Russia’s foreign intelligence service. Under the moniker APT 29, they were hacking Hillary-related targets long before Russia’s military intelligence did so, under the moniker APT 28, during the election. This post provides more background.

Update: I have removed mention of sanctions relief — and business deals generally — in conjunction with Kirill Dmitriev at the asterisks, at the demand of RDIF. I apologize for the original misrepresentation.

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The Russia Russia Russia Grievance Was Built Into Russian Attack from the Start

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On July 29, 2016, two days after SVR crafted the draft memo falsely claiming Hillary Clinton had a Deep State plan to smear Donald Trump that would stoke investigations for much of the last decade, Christopher Steele reached out to Bruce Ohr, then in charge of transnational crime at DOJ. Steele was going to be in DC on short notice. Would he like to meet for breakfast?

The meeting between the two is one of the most curious details of the right wing conspiracy theory that has animated the right wing since.

According to Ohr’s notes and his subsequent testimony, he and Steele spoke about a number of things: a claim sourced to SVR that Russia had Trump over a barrel, both details about Carter Page from the dossier and notice of it, Russian doping, and Oleg Deripaska’s plan to start pressuring Manafort for the money Deripaska claimed he was owed.

Mr. Ohr. So Chris Steele provided me with basically three items of information. One of them I’ve described to you already, the comment that information supposedly stated and made by the head, former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

He also mentioned that Carter Page had met with certain high-level Russian officials when he was in Moscow. My recollection is at that time, the name Carter Page had already been in the press, and there had been some kind of statement about who he had met with when he went to Moscow. And so the first item that I recall Chris Steele telling me was he had information that Carter Page met with higher-level Russian officials, not just whoever was mentioned in the press article. So that was one item.

And then the third item he mentioned was that Paul Hauser, who was an attorney working for Oleg Deripaska, had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with Oleg Deripaska, had stolen a large amount of money from Oleg Deripaska, and that Paul Hauser was trying to gather information that would show that, you know, or give more detail about what Paul Manafort had done with respect to Deripaska.

[snip]

Q Were there any other topics that were discussed during your July 30, 2016, meeting?

A Yes, there were. Based on my sketchy notes from the time, I think there was some information relating to the Russian doping scandal, but I don’t recall the substance of that.

The right wing has pointed to this meeting as the founding moment of what they call Hillary Clinton’s hoax — Steele’s efforts to find side channels via which to share the dossier, which they claim was part of a Hillary plot to frame Trump, though it was one Hillary didn’t know about or sanction.

But they always ignore the Deripaska part. Indeed, even though most Republican members of Congress who have pursued the dossier concluded it was filled with Russian disinformation, even though the DOJ IG Report says (using the moniker Oligarch-1 for Deripaska) that Deripaska had the knowledge and means to do that by the time of this meeting, Deripaska’s potential role has disappeared from all right wing obsession on the dossier (indeed, at the time it did disappear in 2018, well past the time members of Congress were focused on the SVR documents that included the Hillary memo, multiple right wing propagandists were claiming references to Deripaska was really Trump).

Of course, the right wing really wants to say nothing of the way this founding moment of their imagined dossier operation interacts with Konstantin Kilimnik’s role, including a meeting with Trump’s campaign manager he was setting up on those very days, to discuss how to win, how to get Manafort paid, and how to carve up Ukraine. Or the way that Manafort came back from a meeting with a Deripaska aide the following January and started pushing the attack on the dossier.

Oleg Deripaska was playing a brutal double game, but rather than admit that, Republicans would rather join in the Hillary side of it.

But at that moment in July 2016, Russian spooks had already decided it’d be fun to exploit the tensions caused by the election operation by framing Hillary Clinton, and by doing so, discrediting the investigation and giving a malignant narcissist cause for grievance.

I’m not saying that Deripaska was acting on the memo itself (though I find the addition of the Olympics in the memo, matching Steele’s mention of it to Ohr, to be notable). And his 2018 Daily Caller column stoking dossier grievance reads from the same script.

What has been inelegantly termed the “Deep State” is really this: shadow power exercised by a small number of individuals from media, business, government and the intelligence community, foisting provocative and cynically false manipulations on the public. Out of these manipulations, an agenda of these architects’ own design is born.

There was a larger plan to frame Hillary, as evidenced by the Seth Rich attack that started two weeks earlier and got picked up by Julian Assange and Roger Stone two weeks later.

I’m saying the Hillary hoax was built into the operation from the start.

Nor am I saying that Russia expected it would destroy the United States.

It was just one strand of spaghetti they threw at the wall in 2016.

But boy did it stick.

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John Durham’s Guccifer Gaps

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In this post, I reviewed the two premises of John Durham’s investigation into Hillary Clinton:

  • Documents stolen from Russian spies claimed Hillary Clinton had a plan to smear Donald Trump because of his ties to Russia (to which Durham added a plan that she would fabricate evidence against Trump)
  • The FBI should have taken that into consideration before they relied on the Steele dossier or investigated the Alfa Bank anomalies

I also showed that Durham was lying about what document he built that premise off of, which he claimed was a draft SVR report, the date of which he never disclosed (but which appears to date to July 27). In fact, the notice that CIA gave to FBI of that alleged plan was almost certainly a different one, one which made it clear that Hillary didn’t have a plan to frame Trump, but instead that SVR had a plan to frame Hillary.

As part of that argument, I showed how the referral memo — a memo CIA drafted to send to the FBI in early September 2016, but which appears never got sent — doesn’t actually match the draft SVR report (reporting that Hillary would smear Trump), but instead matches emails that show SVR would frame Hillary.

I noted that the memo refers to “an exchange,” not a draft memo.

But I also noted that there was a redaction pertaining to Guccifer 2.0 that, in 2020 — two years after Robert Mueller indicted GRU for Guccifer 2.0 — John Ratcliffe didn’t want to share publicly.

That’s where I may have misstated. I claimed that the report had nothing that could match that kind of Guccifer 2.0 reference. But it actually may. There’s a redaction in the excerpted report in the Durham annex right after a discussion of Guccifer 2.0 (the only reference to Guccifer in the declassified material), which then picks back up with questions of attribution that had been the subject of discussion of one of the only real emails found to be quoted in the report.

In other words, I could be wrong that Guccifer does not feature prominently in this report. It may be that Durham hid it, just like John Ratcliffe hid it in the referral memo.

Still, what’s clear is that the Deep State email that almost certainly launched this effort did tie Guccifer to Hillary.

Effectively, this exchange says, “fuck, they’re onto Guccifer, let’s start a conspiracy theory about Hillary! dark forces!! Deep State!!!” And then the follow-up email describes the conspiracy theory in terms of “vilifying” Putin and Trump.

And that matters because shortly after this email, Russia launched a sustained, two-fold campaign, both to undermine the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 and to frame Hillary Clinton. Indeed, just days after SVR set out to frame Hillary Clinton, the effort to debunk the Guccifer attribution expanded, not least with Roger Stone, who reversed course on the Russian attribution over a matter of days in early August 2016, as if he were reading right from the SVR script.

A few days after that, Julian Assange picked up the Seth Rich conspiracy started, a conspiracy theory that provided an alternative source for the documents stolen by GRU, one that played on dark forces involved with the Clintons.

And where did that come from?

SVR reports purporting to date back to July 13 — the very same stash of documents that fabricated a plan by Hillary Clinton to smear Donald Trump.

ISIKOFF: Exactly. She was puzzled about all the conspiracy theories swirling around the case that she was investigating. So she finally turns to the U.S. intelligence community. She had a security clearance as a assistant U.S. attorney. She asked them to help her figure out, where’s all this stuff coming from? And they come back with a bombshell. They provide Sines with copies, English translations of copies of intelligence bulletins that were circulated by the Russian SVR – that’s Russia’s version of the CIA – just three days after Seth Rich’s death, July 13, 2016. In the intel – that first intelligence bulletin, the SVR suggests – it doesn’t suggest – asserts that Seth Rich was on his way to talk to the FBI that early Sunday morning when he was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton.

And this was, as far as we can tell, the first time that a conspiracy theory about Seth Rich’s death was put out there. That very same day, July 13, it pops up on an obscure website, called whatdoesitmean.com, which, when you look at it and examine it, it’s filled with all sorts of stories attributed to Russian intelligence officials, Russian foreign ministry officials, Russian press reports. It’s effectively a vehicle for Kremlin propaganda. And they apparently took this SVR bulletin that had been intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials and used it to put out this wild conspiracy theory that played right into that far-right conspiratorial meme I mentioned before about the Clintons’ – a Clinton body count and assassins working for the Clintons who go around rubbing out inconvenient people in their political path.

The efforts to undermine the Guccifer 2.0 attribution didn’t much survive the other public attributions, including confirmation in the Intelligence Community Assessment, to say nothing of the Mueller indictment of GRU.

Except, of course, for this guy.

I actually suspect that Durham’s team aspired to include the whole muddle. After all, when interviewing Manos Antonakakis in the days after Durham should have given up his conspiracy theory, Andrew DeFilippis attacked the DNS researcher for deigning to try to attribute Guccifer 2.0.

Finally, I will leave you with an anecdote and a thought. During one of my interviews with the Special Counsel prosecutor, I was asked point blank by Mr. DeFilippis, “Do you believe that DARPA should be instructing you to investigate the origins of a hacker (Guccifer_2.0) that hacked a political entity (DNC)?” Let that sync for a moment, folks. Someone hacked a political party (DNC, in this case), in the middle of an election year (2016), and the lead investigator of DoJ’s special council would question whether US researchers working for DARPA should conduct investigations in this matter is “acceptable”! While I was tempted to say back to him “What if this hacker hacked GOP? Would you want me to investigate him then?”, I kept my cool and I told him that this is a question for DARPA’s director, and not for me to answer.

So the effort to frame Hillary Clinton had to be spun free of the effort to muddle attribution of Guccifer 2.0.

But not when SVR first launched this campaign.

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How Chuck Grassley’s Politicized Redactions Gave Putin Leverage over Trump

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After making Canada, Japan, Vietnam, and Switzerland go to the US and making the EU go to Trump’s golf course in Scotland to negotiate tariffs, Trump sent his real estate developer buddy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow to negotiate tariffs with Vladimir Putin.

I would have low expectations that Witkoff, who has gotten his ass handed to him at every turn, would negotiate a reasonable deal with Russia in any case.

All the more so given the politicized release of old documents on Russia that Tulsi Gabbard has orchestrated in recent weeks.

Consider just this redaction in the classified Durham appendix that Chuck Grassley released last week.

As I laid out here, the redaction is designed to fool readers in several ways.

First, it helps to sustain a fiction that the draft SVR memo purporting to report Hillary Clinton approving a plan to smear Donald Trump is the first document in a series, and not the last. That, in turn, serves to suggest that what I call the Deep State memo, laying out a plan by SVR to frame Hillary came after the draft memo, rather than laid out a plan to fabricate the memo, complete with fabricated emails including Russian idioms attributed to Leonard Benardo.

But that’s not right. The Deep State email was, Durham described, sent on July 26. The draft SVR email incorporates an email fabricated on July 27.

Indeed, after this Deep State email, Russian spies talked about “mak[ing] [something]” — that is, fabricating emails — to “illuminate” how Clinton wanted to “vilif[y]” Trump and Putin, proposing an initial fabricated July 25 email promising to, “put more oil into the fire,” but not yet adding reference to the doping scandal that was contemporaneously a very sore subject for Russia. The email with the reference to the Olympics, dated July 25 but almost certainly fabricated on July 27, is the one that was incorporated into the draft SVR memo.

In response, those Russian spies said … we don’t know what, but we do know that they attached the fabricated July 27 email purporting to reflect Hillary approving that plan on July 26.

I’d love to know what that email says; it may make it more clear that this was all a great plan to frame Hillary Clinton, or it may reveal other parts of the plan, possibly pertaining to Guccifer 2.0. But I don’t need to know what it says to know that the email gives Putin great leverage over Donald Trump at the moment that Trump finally tries to assert a strong hand with the Russian dictator.

By hiding that email in an attempt to hide that what Trump has claimed for eight years was an effort by Hillary to frame Trump was — is, still — a wildly successful attempt by SVR to frame Hillary, Trump’s top spies — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director and Useful Idiom John Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Kash Patel — have all sustained a secret with Russia’s spies, a secret Kash has been chasing all that time, a secret that could legally implicate at least Ratcliffe and Kash (not least because they sustained this campaign during the time they were private citizens) in a crime.

Trump’s top spies are keeping a secret: the secret that for the last eight years Trump has carried out precisely the plan to frame Hillary Clinton that those SVR spies first ginned up on July 26, 2016.

And here’s the thing. Putin’s spies know much of what is behind that redaction. They can reverse engineer it because the footnote to it shows that the email in question is the one to which those Russian spies attached that fake July 27 email, nine years ago. They still have that email. Hell, it’s probably hanging in a gilt-edged frame somewhere, Putin’s trophy from a wildly successful attempt to compromise the Main Enemy.

So that redaction is not, as a classification redaction should, keeping any secrets from our adversaries. The Russian spies know what is too embarrassing for Grassley and Tulsi and Kash and Ratcliffe to release.

But we don’t.

And that’s why this entire frenzy to release more secrets just in advance of this meeting with Putin has made Trump far, far weaker.

Donald Trump cares more about his claims of grievance, a fake grievance that has always gotten him out of jams, than he does about America, to say nothing of Ukraine.

And Chuck Grassley’s willful protection of this secret between Putin’s spies and Trump’s has only served to give Putin leverage over Trump and over the United States.

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Planning for a Cover-Up in a House with Small Children and Other Stories of How Todd Blanche Is Helping a Sex Trafficker

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CNN has a story about how Trump’s impeachment defense attorney, his criminal defense attorney, the flunkie who helped frame Hillary Clinton, and his Chief of Staff will go to JD Vance’s home — where he is raising three children under the age of 10 — to discuss how to make Donald Trump’s sex trafficking problem go away.

They apparently believe that Todd Blanche can hold his own in an interview with Joe Rogan, who has long smelled the rat in this cover-up.

The administration’s handling of the Epstein case, as well as the need to craft a unified response, is expected to be a main focus of the dinner, three sources familiar with the meeting told CNN. The meeting will include White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Blanche.

With the exception of Vance, the White House considers those officials the leaders of the administration’s ongoing strategy regarding the Epstein files, two of the sources said.

The meeting comes as Trump’s administration is considering releasing the contents of Blanche’s interview last month with Maxwell. Two officials told CNN that the materials could be made public as early as this week.

There have also been internal discussions about Blanche holding a press conference or doing a high-profile interview, possibly with popular podcaster Joe Rogan, according to three people familiar with the discussions, though those conversations are preliminary. Rogan, who endorsed Trump on the eve of last fall’s election, has been highly critical of the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case and previously called their refusal release more information about Epstein a “line in the sand.”

To be fair to Blanche, though, he has managed to serve his client, and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, well so far.

Yesterday, Maxwell’s attorney, David Markus, submitted his — well-justified — opposition to releasing the grand jury materials for Ghislaine Maxwell’s case, the ones that would feature a broad swath of victims. He as much as conceded that this might have provided a way to review the grand jury files (another benefit Blanche tried to offer), but now that Judge Paul Engelmeyer denied that request, he’s opposed to the unsealing request.

Although the government did not oppose allowing the defense to review the grand jury material to assess whether to object to its release, the Court denied that request. As a result, Ghislaine Maxwell has not seen the material and cannot take an informed position. Given that she is actively litigating her case and does not know what is in the grand jury record, she has no choice but to respectfully oppose the government’s motion to unseal it.

Maxwell’s opposition is likely enough, by itself, to rule against release of the Maxwell transcripts, which would include far more detail than Epstein’s would.

Little noticed is the line in the DOJ filing describing DOJ telling third parties — not victims — if they appear in the grand jury transcripts.

In addition, the Government is in the process of providing notice to any other individuals identified in the transcripts.

Meanwhile, DOJ confessed yesterday that they have still not notified all the victims identified in the transcripts, and only just started to notify the victims covered under the relevant victim notification law.

Seventh, regarding the Government’s approach to victim notification of the instant proceedings, as noted in its July 29 submission, the Government has provided notice of the unsealing motions to all but one of the victims who are referenced in the grand jury transcripts at issue in the motions. The Government still has been unable to contact that remaining victim. With respect to victims who are not identified in the grand jury transcripts but who have previously received victim notifications in the Maxwell and Epstein matters, the Government will over the coming days alert those victims to the fact of the unsealing motions.

That letter was posted the same day as this letter from Brad Edwards, who likely represents the largest number of known victims. He accuses the government of violating the Crime Victims’ Rights Act generally, as well as losing track of some victims who are likely implicated in the Epstein and Maxwell grand juries but only came to be represented by Edwards after their testimony. He describes that “yesterday” (that is, Monday), he contacted the government about the other victims and they responded, which suggests this newfound focus on other victims is a response to Edwards’ efforts.

Given our history fighting for the enforcement of the CVRA on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein’s many victims, we were quite surprised to learn that the government sought the unsealing of grand jury materials before this Court without first conferring with the victims or their counsel, a step required by the CVRA and reinforced by Doe v. United States, 08-80736 (S.D. Fla.). That case, litigated pro bono by undersigned counsel for more than a decade, arose precisely because the government previously violated the rights of many of these very same victims. It is especially troubling that, despite the outcome of that litigation, the government has once again proceeded in a manner that disregards the victims’ rights—suggesting that the hard-learned lessons of the past have not taken hold. This omission reinforces the perception that the victims are, at best, an afterthought to the current administration.

Of significant concern, the same government that failed to provide notice to the victims before moving this Court to unseal the grand jury materials is now the government representing to this Court that it has provided appropriate notice to the victims or their counsel and has conducted a proper review and redaction of the materials it seeks to release. Several clients have contacted us expressing deep anxiety over whether the redactions were in fact adequate. Consequently, we requested yesterday that the government identify which of our clients were referenced to the grand jury. The government responded promptly and provided clarification. However, we have strong reason to believe that additional individuals—whom we also represent—were likely referenced in those materials but were not identified to us by the government.

It remains unclear whether notice was instead provided to prior counsel, whether their omission was a government oversight, whether the government does not consider them to be victims, or whether these individuals were, in fact, not mentioned to the grand jury. Regardless of the explanation, this ambiguity raises a serious issue that must be resolved before any materials are publicly released. [my emphasis]

You know who wouldn’t have fucked up this process? The prosecutor Pam Bondi fired on Trump’s authority just as this cover-up began, Maurene Comey.

The asymmetric treatment is pissing off the victims. Annie Farmer’s attorney describes that the intent to redact third party names “smacks of a cover up.”

Any effort to redact third party names smacks of a cover up. The Government does not elaborate on what protocol it is using to redact other “third party” names or which types of individuals it seeks to protect in this way. To the extent the Government for some reason seeks to redact the names of other Epstein and Maxwell affiliates on the basis that these individuals “neither have been charged or alleged to be involved” in their crimes, the Court should exercise its independent authority to ensure that any redactions are tailored to serve compelling interests. See generally Brown v. Maxwell, 929 F.3d 41, 50 (2d Cir. 2019) (even if materials are not considered judicial documents to which a presumption of public access applies, “a court must still articulate specific and substantial reasons for sealing such material”).

I have a feeling Judge Richard Berman (who has been posting victim letters as they come in) will not take kindly to a grand jury unsealing in which people like Donald Trump and Prince Andrew get notice, but the victims do not.

This may change as Congress gets involved. Perhaps in an attempt to stave off the Massie-Khanna bid for true transparency that will ripen over the August recess, James Comer announced a bunch of subpoenas for people not named Alex Acosta or Donald Trump.

Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) announced that he was summoning nearly a dozen former officials to appear for depositions on the Epstein investigation — a list that includes former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Former U.S. Attorneys General William Barr, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder and Merrick Garland, as well as former FBI Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey were also tapped to give testimony in connection to the case.

Comer was required to send the subpoenas after a Democratic-led subcommittee vote in July.

The move is the latest in a broader battle over the Epstein files, which took the Trump administration by storm last month as anger boiled over from within MAGA circles about the administration’s handling of the case.

The committee’s subpoena of Bill Clinton in particular seems more symbolic than substantive. No former president has ever testified to Congress under the compulsion of a subpoena — and lawmakers have tried only twice before: once in 1953, when the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed Harry Truman, and once in 2022, when the Jan. 6 select committee subpoenaed Donald Trump.

While this is the rare Epstein development that Fox has covered, there’s so much about this request that reeks of a cover-up it may well backfire.

But as Lisa Rubin describes, there’s also a subpoena to DOJ — the price of the Clinton testimony — that does make demands that would, among other things, cover the transcript of the Ghislaine Maxwell interview.

By ABC’s description, Blanche got Ghislaine to perform like a trained seal, asking her to describe what he did in her presence, but not asking her about what he did when he learned she had “stolen” one of Trump’s spa girls and forced her into sex slavery.

During her nine hours speaking with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last month, Ghislaine Maxwell said nothing during the interview that would be harmful to President Donald Trump, telling Blanche that Trump had never done anything in her presence that would have caused concern, according to sources familiar with what Maxwell said.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is considering publicly releasing the transcripts from the interview, multiple sources familiar with the internal discussions told ABC News.

There are a lot of moving parts.

Including Ghislaine, to her new cozier digs, where the other inmates, including one whose daughter was trafficked, are already expressing disgust that Todd Blanche put a sex trafficker among their midst.

Julie Howell, 44, who is serving a one-year sentence for theft, told The Telegraph that “every inmate I’ve heard from is upset she’s here”.

“This facility is supposed to house non-violent offenders,” she added. “Human trafficking is a violent crime.”

[snip]

Inmates at FPC Bryan are worried about their own safety, given the widespread threats against Maxwell and lack of tight security on the prison grounds.

Howell said: “We have heard there are threats against her life and many of us are worried about our own safety because she’s here.”

Her comments will only fuel concern that could be targeted at the facility, preventing her testimony about Epstein from ever seeing the light of day.

Maxwell was allegedly moved under the cover of darkness because she had been “bombarded” with death threats from rapists who accused her of being a “snitch”, according to the Mail on Sunday.

Multiple outlets, including that CNN story, report that Trump’s close advisors think they’ve weathered this crisis because their mobsters — people like Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson — have been distracted by other things.

One official told CNN that some of the conversation within the White House has focused on whether making the details from the interview public would bring the Epstein controversy back to the surface. Many officials close to Trump believe the story has largely died down.

We shall see.

As I wrote here, Trump and Blanche have the power to silence Maxwell, if the rapists calling her a snitch don’t get to her first.

But the moving parts and sheer cynicism of the cover-up may backfire.

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Old Man Transparency Chuck Grassley Confesses He Covered Up the ICA Annex for Five Years

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Just days after releasing the Durham Report classified annex with critical details censored, Chuck Grassley released Intelligence Community Assessment appendix summarizing the Steele dossier that John Ratcliffe had declassified for him five years ago, then ran to Xitter and claimed other people had been involved in a cover-up.

These people are so incompetent that each new release only does more damage to their case.

The dossier appendix didn’t help in 2020

Grassley released the appendix along with John Ratcliffe’s cover letter, dated June 10, 2020, explaining to Grassley and Ron Johnson that, “I am writing in response to your 22 May 2020 letter seeking the declassification” of the dossier annex and the March 2018 version of the 2020 HPSCI report released weeks ago.

Grassley and Johnson asked Ratcliffe to declassify these things the day after he was confirmed, the day Ratcliffe resigned from the House where (among other things) he served on HPSCI. Ratcliffe turned around the ICA annex just over two weeks after he was sworn in, but noted that the HPSCI Report was a Congressional Report not in custody of ODNI, and he would have to ask the HPSCI Chair — then Adam Schiff — to turn it over.

The right wing has complained that Schiff, possibly with then-CIA Director Gina Haspel, didn’t release the HPSCI Report.

But Ratcliffe released the ICA appendix during the period when Senators were releasing similar documents (including, via Mike Flynn’s attempt to renege on his plea agreement). And no one bothered to release this publicly. And when HPSCI Republicans updated their Report months later, they didn’t bother to include the Appendix itself in the 10-page section of their report attacking the dossier.

This is not an example of transparency. It’s an example of suppression.

The ICA annex proves right wing lies now

It’s clear why Grassley never released the document.

There are several things in the ICA annex — as opposed to the dossier — that right wingers misrepresent. As I noted, the GOP neglected to mention the caveat in the first paragraph, noting that the dossier was “highly politically sensitive information” for which US spooks had “only limited corroboration” and so “did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment.” It turns out the 2-page annex is barely a page-and-a-half (which means between HPSCI and I we’ve written far more about this document than exists in the document itself). HPSCI might rightly complain that the appendix didn’t describe that Steele had been closed for cause, but they misrepresent several other parts of their complaint, notably that Steele “collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI” and that “multiple Western press organizations” started printing it (they got the date wrong but to get to the larger scope of Steele’s press blitz, HPSCI did over a year of persistent investigation). The GOP complained that this section had classification markers, but the most substantive ones come in the 3-bullet section that compares the dossier content to existing intelligence (and besides, when the ICA was published on January 5, 2017, Steele’s identity was not yet publicly confirmed).

Perhaps most egregiously, the HPSCI Report misrepresents what is in the ICA appendix.

It claims “the dossier’s most significant claims–that Russia launched cyber activities to leak political emails–were little more than a regurgitation of stories previously published by multiple media outlets prior to the creation of a dossier.” I pointed out how that is wildly, affirmatively false. The most immediately apparent problem with the dossier were its claims about hacking conflicted with known details of the Russian campaign.

As pertaining to hacking, though — their primary focus — it’s actually not that the dossier parroted things that were public.

It’s that they affirmatively rebutted the most obvious conclusions from the ongoing hack-and-leak. For example, the first and several reports completed after that all suggested that the Kompromat that Russia had on Hillary was decades old material from when she traveled to Russia, not the hack-and-leak campaign rolling out in front of our eyes. A July 26, 2016 report, released after the DNC release and almost a year after the first public attributions of the APT 29 hack of State and DOD to Russia, claimed that Russia wasn’t having much success at hacking Western targets, a claim that anyone briefed on those APT 29 hacks (including the Republicans so taken with the SVR reports stolen in those hacks) would know was laughable. The most incendiary December 13 post attributed the troll campaign to Webzilla, not Yevgeniy Prigozhin. That is, the dossier wasn’t just delayed; it affirmatively contradicted most of the publicly known details about the election interference campaign and even more of the details that the ICA addressed closely.

But that claim was about the dossier, not the ICA annex, which included the following:

  • A 3-bullet section describing things in the dossier that “is consistent with the judgments in this assessment,” including
    • A bullet on Moscow’s aim, which was the excuse HPSCI used to put the dossier in the section it appears in at all
    • A single bullet on the dossier’s claims about the hack-and-leak, focused on Russian attempts to direct coverage of the WikiLeaks material
    • A bullet describing the dossier’s claim that Russia backed off its influence campaign as the election approached
  • A 4-bullet section about Steele’s claims about Trump’s flunkies, pitched as a defensive briefing

The defensive briefing section includes this complaint (it is just one of the several places where they complain how widely this disseminated, without recognizing most of that dissemination took place under Trump):

I’m unclear what right wingers want from Carter Page. By the time of the ICA, the FBI knew (from Stefan Halper) that Carter Page was hoping to set up a pro-Russian think tank with funding from Russia. And if you believe Konstantin Kilimnik, Page had been wandering around Moscow just weeks earlier, claiming to speak for Trump on Ukraine.

The near-miss looks like a direct hit

But here’s the most remarkable thing about the ICA appendix — which likely explains why Grassley didn’t release it in 2020.

Here’s that defensive briefing section:

I’ve long described (here’s a post from 2018) that, to the extent Russia managed to fill the dossier with disinformation, they larded it with near-misses which would discomfort Trump, but help to provide cover for or deniability for the things that actually did happen. As a result, when you make a list of things that appear in the dossier but leave off the names, it looks utterly prescient (but was not). Take these bullets one by one:

The Kremlin had cultivated Trump for at least five years and fed him and his team intelligence agreed to use WikiLeaks in exchange for policy considerations. Moscow had cultivated Trump at least since the 2013 beauty pageant, far longer if you believe Craig Ungar. And not only did Russia give his campaign advance notice that they would drop emails on Hillary and offer his failson dirt on Hillary, Roger Stone credibly claimed to have advance access to WikiLeaks files (including specific files on John Podesta) and as Roger was arranging that, Manafort met with alleged spy Konstantin Kilimnik to share his strategy for winning swing states, a plan to get Manafort paid, and a plan to carve up Ukraine.

Russian authorities possessed compromising material on Trump from when he was in Russia. The SSCI Report found several claims of a sex tape and Russia knew Trump was lying to cover up Michael Cohen’s pursuit of that Trump Tower deal.

There were secret meetings between the Kremlin and Trump’s advisors, and at least one was offered financial renumeration. Cohen spoke with the Kremlin directly about an impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal. And the Kilimnik meeting with Manafort fulfills all the claims of coordination and renumeration.

In other words, once you take the names out, Steele’s near-miss reports were direct hits, just in a way that distracted from the principals.

Update: WaPo describes that Tulsi released the HPSCI Report in much less redacted form than CIA wanted.

 

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Russia’s Useful Idiom, John Ratcliffe: Lost in Two Translations

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John Ratcliffe keeps going on propaganda channels to parrot Russian idioms (and make false claims) shamelessly. Whichever Russian spy wrote that disinformation package years ago must have gotten a new dacha to reward him for how he has turned America’s CIA Director into an unabashed useful idiom for Russia.

Ratcliffe might want to rein in his boisterousness, however. Because Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard — or whoever actually did the declassification of the Durham appendix — left just enough breadcrumbs to suggest there’s a material difference between the FBI and some other government agency’s translation of the Deep State email reflecting an SVR plan to frame Hillary Clinton. Ratcliffe may not realize just how clear it is that John Durham framed Hillary Clinton, with Ratcliffe’s help.

I started down this rabbit hole when I puzzled through this footnote, revealing that there are multiple translations of “some” of the items in question.

So I made a table of all the documents identified as exhibits to the appendix, showing which footnote referred to which document and the language of the document.

The first thing this exercise disclosed were two missing documents — or rather, documents the discussions of which are entirely redacted.

The first appears in a discussion of a 2017 CIA review that concluded these SVR reports — it’s not clear whether the report reviewed just the Loretta Lynch ones, or all of them; I have a hunch this report also discusses Oleg Deripaska — were not fabrications. Note missing footnote 76 here.

The second is more interesting–but it’s part of a far more important discovery. At least according to the footnotes, the redactions in these two passages (which bracket the draft report that Durham falsely claims was the basis of his investigation) serve to obscure which fake Leonard Benardo email was incorporated into which SVR document.

The reference to “The above-referenced [SVR] memorandum included the English text of a document” pertains to the Benardo email that appears second in the appendix — the one with the (stupid, obviously Russian) references to the Olympics.

There are at least two versions of the Benardo email (identified as Appendix Documents 5 and 6 in footnote 36) that lack the Olympics reference.

And one of those, Appendix Document 6, is what was attached to the July 27 email described in the unredacted passage here.

The fake Benardo email dated July 27 — which these redactions tried hard to suggest was attached to the email mentioning “vilif[ying] Moscow” — was actually attached to another communication completely obscured by this redaction, the second missing document. Footnote 40 and footnote 41 both cite Classified Appendix Document 8.

This clarifies the process by which the draft report that Durham falsely claimed was the basis of his investigation was made.

The first email in the chain is the July 26 Deep State one — the one saying it’d be cool to frame Hillary.

The second is that July 27 email — basically a discussion about how they were going to frame Hillary, attaching one of the fake Benardo emails without mention of the Olympics. Again, that’s what got mentioned in John Brennan’s notes, not the report. At that point, one of the spies must have thought it would be cute to make a reference to what appears to be the Olympics doping scandal, which was ongoing at the time, something that mattered to the Russians but probably not Benardo or Julianne Smith, and so they altered the fake Benardo email for inclusion in the eventual report, to add the Olympics.

And then a third email between Russian spies — the one that is completely redacted — attached the fake Benardo email, dated July 27, claiming Hillary had approved this plan. The email reflecting approval came after the spies decided to frame Hillary (not like it matters since the emails were all fake anyway).

Now, as I keep saying, the report that Durham falsely claimed was the basis of his investigation had to come after that missing email, because that’s what they fabricated to claim that Hillary had actually approved the plan. The report was the last document, not the first, as Durham misleadingly suggested by putting it at the beginning of his discussion. The unredacted report would make clear that both the approval and the Olympics reference were deliberately added to take Benardo emails, and then incorporated in the draft report itself.

Which brings me back to where I started. Aside from two documents of little interest here (a document on Benardo that could be a SVR profile of him or could just be his bio, Classified Appendix Document 1) and the entirely redacted reference associated with the 2017 CIA review (Classified Appendix Document 10), there are six documents in Russian:

  • The January 2016 report mentioning Loretta Lynch and Jim Comey
  • The March 2016 report mentioning Loretta Lynch
  • The July 26 Deep State email discussing framing Hillary
  • The July 27 email, to which one of the fake July 25 Benardo emails that did not mention the Olympics was attached
  • The missing document, to which the fake July 27 Benardo email was attached
  • The draft report, to which the fake July 25 Benardo email that mentioned the Olympics was incorporated

The January and March reports are actually the same document, Classified Appendix Document 2. Durham describes both were “in Russian,” with the discussion of translation redacted; this discussion tracks the DOJ IG Report closely, and so may have used those same versions.

As you can see above, the discussion about who translated the July 27 email and the missing one is entirely redacted. The same is true of the draft report itself.

Not the July 26 Deep State email, though.

The intro to that states clearly that Durham used an FBI translation: “The FBI’s translation of this email is as follows.”

In other words, the July 26 Deep State email showing that Russian spies decided to frame Hillary before they fabricated emails supporting their effort exists in at least two versions.

And John Ratcliffe, rattling off Russian idioms on every Fox show, may not know that.

Update: I’m reviewing the Michael Sussmann case, and Andrew DeFilippis played a similar temporal gimmick twice during that trial.

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